31. The Mechanisms of Changes in the Infrastructure of the Payment Card Market—A Comparative Analysis of Poland and China

The Chinese payment card market differs significantly from the Polish one. The strategies for and the levels of its development vary in both countries. The subject of this work constitutes an attempt to compare the development of the infrastructure servicing the payment card markets in Poland and in China. The study was carried out based on the quarterly time series from the years 2008 to 2017. The subject of consideration is the infrastructure networks used to service payment cards. Two most important components of the payment card infrastructure were considered: the number of the point of sale terminals handling payment cards (POS) and the number of the automated teller machines (ATMs). The similarities and the differences in the construction of this infrastructure, resulting from various internal and external conditions, have been presented. The radical size differences between Poland and China result in the need to apply solutions that use quantitative market characteristics, expressed per capita, and to use measures of intensity, which are characterized by comparability of the results. The study used statistical and econometric tools for analysis of the characteristics of the payment card market infrastructure. A hypothesis was formulated about the existence of a feedback between the number of POSs and the number of ATMs, per 1 million payment cards, both in Poland and in China. This hypothesis was verified using an econometric model. The empirical econometric model allows a description of the mechanisms of the payment card market infrastructure and can be used to construct short-term forecasts.